The 4th of July is a tough day for liberals

And I’m not referring to the bugs, or the crowds, or the traffic on the highways.

I’m talking about the mindless patriotic bubble bath we’re all supposed to soak in all weekend long.

Well, not me.

My heart does not beat faster at the strains of the Star Spangled Banner, much less at the sight of F-16s flying overhead to kick off the show.

You see, I don’t believe in patriotism.

You can call me unpatriotic if you’d like, but really I’m anti-patriotic.

I’ve been studying fascism lately, and there is one inescapable fact about it:

Nationalism is the egg that hatches fascism.

And patriotism is but the father of nationalism.

Patriotism is not something to play with. It’s highly toxic. When ingested, it corrodes the rational faculties.

It gulls people into believing their leaders.

It masks those who benefit most from state policy.

And it destroys the ability of people to get together, within the United States and across boundaries, to take on those with the most power: the multinational corporation.

Plus, it’s a war toy, wheeled out whenever a leader needs to improve his ratings by attacking some other country—often after invoking God’s name, too.

It’s been so since the Spanish-American War and World War I and right up through the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War.

American patriotism has also gotten in the way of solving global warming. Many in the United States, which consumes 25 percent of the world’s resources but has just 4 percent of the world’s population, believe we have the God-given right to use up all the resources we can. And there is an all-too-common attitude that we don’t need to listen to any other countries, or the U.N., or obey any international agreements because we’re Americans, and we’re better than everybody else.

We’ve got to get over patriotism, and we’ve got to cure the American superiority complex.

So celebrate the 4th if you like.

But as for me, between God, country, and apple pie, I’ll take the apple pie.

Every year I wrestle with Independence Day. I don’t know why I can’t just enjoy it … the sights, sounds, camaraderie, bon hommie, brownies and, of course, fireworks. No. I must wrestle with ideas. What is this day that we celebrate each year. Are we free? What does that mean? How does our freedom here effect and affect others around the world? What have we done and what are we doing?

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It has been said that my freedom ends at your nose. This implies that I am free to act as I will as long as it does not impinge upon your freedom. Then we have a problem. So if restraints are to be applied, they must be internal. That is, I must apply them.What if I do not? What if I choose to bumble on my merry way getting my stuff because I am free … what I thought was freedom is just greed.

The American flag stands for the fact that cloth can be very important. You can tell just how important this cloth is because when you compare it to people, it gets much better treatment. Nobody cares if a homeless person touches the ground. A homeless person can lie all over the ground all night long without anyone picking him up, folding him neatly and sheltering him from the rain. School children have to pledge loyalty to this piece of cloth every morning.

No one has to pledge loyalty to justice and equality and human decency. No one has to promise that people will get a fair wage, or enough food to eat, or affordable medicine, or clean water, or air free of harmful chemicals. But we all have to promise to love a rectangle of red, white and blue cloth.

Betsy Ross would be quite surprised to see how successful her creation has become. But Thomas Jefferson would be disappointed to see how little of the flag’s real meaning remains.

— Charlotte Aldebron, from a 2002 essay she wrote for her sixth-grade English class at Cunningham Middle School in Presque Isle, Maine

So tough to be a liberal in the land of the free, the home of the brave, especially on the 4th.

Comments

My diagnosis......... folks like these have a systemic hormonal deficiency. Usually requiring a large dose of shoe leather administered rectally until both they and the disease that they carry are successfully removed from the presence of the rest of us. .

Whenever liberals desire wistfully for people to be generally better behaved, I cannot help but think the divide is anything but accidental, that it is deliberate on somebody's part. And that somebody is probably a liberal. How long do you have to wait for a conservative or libertarian to express a desire for people to be generally better behaved? Not long; not long at all.

But the left seldom-to-never desires more kids to be availed of the advantage of being raised in a two-parent home, or for fewer homes to be burglarized, fewer women brutalized, fewer people murdered, fewer dictators overseas gettin' away with shenanigans. When you listen to them prattle on awhile, it's clear they don't really care that much about what people do, so much as what kind of people they are. They have their classes of "good" and "bad" all picked out, and if you're in the last group there's really nothing you can do to make 'em happy.

The Editor of The Progressive: "I’ve been studying fascism lately, and there is one inescapable fact about it:
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Nationalism is the egg that hatches fascism.
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And patriotism is but the father of nationalism."

Ah! So the (in)famous "slippery-slope argument" *IS* a valid argument. At least, when it is put to "progressive" ends.

Yea, I'm sure all these anti-patriotism folks asked their bosses if they could work yesterday. Same with Memorial Day and Veterans Day…

What wretched souls to hold nothing, less the individual, up to be cherished, especially the one country that has by itself brought so much to the world.

Why exactly do they even live here, there certainly must be a place that fits their idea of utopia? Playing the role of martyr would seem to get old after awhile. Leave the passport at the gate and have a nice life. Oh look, someone wants your spot. Actually, tens of thousands do.